I’ve Rebranded!

I’ve had this last week off work, which is brilliant but I haven’t yet done any sewing because I’ve been working on rebranding my little corner of the internet!

The biggest change is the name (obviously!). I hadn’t been super happy with the name of my blog for a while because the ‘Thrift’ part (of ‘Thrift, Make, Sew’) didn’t really make sense. I thought it sort of represented the refashions I sometimes do, but then I’ve done only 1 (or possibly 2) this whole year so far and since I don’t really analyse the costs of my makes, it bothered me that it didn’t seem to fit with what I wrote about. Ironically I do now have a few refashions in the works, but I still fancied a change.

I hope you like the new name. I like the sort of play on ‘sewing machine’ but it also fits with the other things I now write about – like the posts I do monthly planning what I’m making and the Wardrobe Architect series I’ve been doing. I also have ideas for adding another large set of projects…..when I eventually get around to it!

I swear I took some screenshots to show what my blog looked like before but now I can’t find them, wah!

My old header was this:

I’ve changed it for a photo, with more bright colours in. I haven’t really changed my colour palette (turquoise, yellow, coral, grey, light turquoise) but I wanted more colours in the header photo.

I’ve also changed my profile picture, from one of my garment shots to one I took specifically as a profile picture and I think that was a good move.

The biggest job, which has taken me a massive chunk of the last 3 days was to update the thumbnails on my archive pages. I decided to use a different font – Calibri instead of Tahoma and to make all the writing black. Previously I did them in different colours depending on the category, but the yellow, grey and turquoise weren’t super easy to read!

The new ones are at the bottom. I definitely prefer the look of them – they look cleaner and there’s a bit more white space I think. I have replaced all of the thumbnails on the archive pages, which took a while, I can tell you!

There are still some things to update – I manually add recommendations to the bottom of each post and I haven’t changed them all yet, so the old thumbnails will appear there. With 12 pages of posts in my dashboard, it might take a while to change them all. And on some of them, I’d forgotten to add them in the first place so it’s been good to check so far.

The other change I’ve made is to streamline my sidebar as I felt it looked a bit messy. It still might need some work, though! I’ve also changed themes, and this theme removes the sidebar when you’re on a page, which I like. I also like that the menu stays at the top all the time. I’m still getting to grips with customizing the CSS so I expect there will be some other tweaks to come, but overall I’m pretty happy with my new look and new name – and .com instead of .wordpress.com domain! I’ve paid to redirect all the links from the old site, so hopefully everything should be seamless, but let me know if you spot anything that doesn’t work and I’ll see if I can figure out how to fix it!

I hope you continue to read my little blog, despite all the changes! If you follow me on bloglovin, you may have to follow my new site name, sorry! I thought it would update automatically but I think I did all the changes a bit wrong for that to happen!